“What she had could not quite be put into words, but the best way to capture it may be to say that she knew what wasn’t true.” –Anne Lamott, Hallelujah Anyway

I’m in a season of learning what’s not true.

The Kid and I talked about it the other night as he was falling asleep, Little Brother already sacked out beside us. This is when so many of our meaningful conversations occur now, in that space between daylight and night, the twilight seeping through their window, the coming darkness allowing fears to float to the surface and feelings to be whispered before dreams transform them into images. He was talking about feeling sad, about how Year One is so much different, and harder, than kindy; how it makes him sad when I leave. He asked what would happen if we all disappeared and he was left alone in the house and I did the thing parents do: I made a promise I have no real power to keep, telling him that will never happen. That we are with him.

“And God is with me?” he asked, calling for divine assurance in the way only children (and distrusting adults, ahem) can: as backup. As co-pilot.

“Yes, always,” I told him, because we believe these things even as we doubt them, even as all evidence points to the contrary. Believe me, I’ve tried the opposite. Didn’t take.

“He’s in my heart? He’ll never leave me alone?” he asked, assurance and reassurance stacking upon each other, never enough.

“Yes,” I said, and told him one painful yet freeing thing I’ve learned: that our feelings can lie to us. That when the sad turns to being afraid, to be suspicious, because this could be a lie. Sometimes sad is real, and must be felt. But sometimes it can be based on a feeling that is based on a lie.

Because I’ve been learning it–what isn’t true–so that I can tell them what is.

I’ve learned that feeling happy isn’t what keeps us safe. That easy isn’t always better. I’d rather remember this in years when things are easier, when he skips into school and can’t wait to go back, rather than a year in which (so far) every day is a struggle to get through the gate and the classroom door. But I don’t remember it as well then, do I? I don’t need to.

I’ve learned that it isn’t me who ultimately protects him. That my hands can only hold–and hold back–so much.

I’ve learned that some amount of letting go is always necessary, and always awful.

I’ve learned that I can’t stay at his school and stare through the window all day with a video camera. APPARENTLY.

I’ve learned that the bottom of a bottle of wine may not hold all the answers.

I’ve learned that running from feelings just makes them run faster to catch up.

I’ve learned there are no blood tests for what TK and I have, these anxieties that plague us, that turn into spectres that dog us and clench our insides until we must be unravelled to be healed.

But I’ve also learned other things.

I’ve learned that the hands that are big enough to hold my children also have room for me, if I will let them. That grace operates independent of mathematic principles, because the more I need, the more it abounds. The more I use, the more is left over.

I’ve learned that I can’t stay with him at school, but I can go into his room when he calls at night, and I can lie between him and LB and answer their questions just at the point when I’m so spent I think I have nothing left, and grace will tiptoe in and be enough for all of us. I’ve learned that they can fall asleep hearing the truth.

I’ve learned that sitting down with feelings and facing them, rather than running to some other distraction, can leave them both disempowered and somehow befriended. which makes them scream less. Which…helps.

I’ve learned that, for me, the bottom of the bottle may not hold the answers but a glass or two can, and the truth for me lies on some murky line in that deep red liquid.

I’ve learned that both anxiety and hope are future-focused and that we carry both, and are formed by both, and will be freed in the midst of both.

I’ve learned that I have one kid who, at his brother’s age, wouldn’t sit still for or participate in a group class, but that I have one, LB, who will be the star of Gymbaroo his first week. That pitying glances and “oh, he’s so cute!” exclamations don’t begin to sum up either of my children.

I’ve learned that I have one kid who didn’t speak until he was four, and that I have one who, at three, pronounces to everyone in the grocery store that “broccoli smells like farts.”

And I’ve learned this: that at their baptisms, neither much liked the water spilled over their heads by hands that loved them, but that now, they ask what it all means; they watch the babies up front endure the same and turn to us with grins on their faces, knowing they’re a part of something. That they are held by things deeper than feelings, by blood and water, bread and wine, promises kept.

I’ve learned that hallelujahs that are broken are still hallelujahs. That they may, even, be the best kind.

It’s the same with every new group of people–and life has been full of those for the last few years. There’s the getting-to-know-you awkwardness, which my social anxiety allows me to feel keenly. There’s the wondering whether I should reveal all the sections of me that are a hot mess, which is to say, ALL OF THE SECTIONS: my history of pre- and postpartum depression and anxiety, my childhood quirks that have largely been resolved due to coping mechanisms (WINE) but which will always familiarise me with feeling a part of the “weird” kids, the outcasts; my American accent, which carries its own baggage (I promise I won’t shoot you and no, I didn’t vote for him); and, over dinner tables and in schoolyards, over classroom desks and social drinks, the spectrum diagnosis that somehow defines us and doesn’t, colours every day yet can be even forgotten in the monotony of just life.

There are people who wouldn’t have even known, they tell me, had I not told them about The Kid’s special Apple brain (our current preferred work for autism, thanks), and this begs the question: when’s the time, if ever, to admit we’re different?

I find that I’m drawn to the people who do admit it, so maybe the answer is…always?

My friend said it over the phone the other day: “Why do our kids always have to expose us?” And my thoughts were multi-fold: 1) Damn right. 2) Because they’re assholes. 3) Because that’s how grace works. Rudely, and effectively, because we need it. 4) I cannot wait for people to read the book CG and I are writing because this kind of stuff is all over it.

Because it turns out that it’s not so much about TK’s social challenges, or Little Brother’s struggle with not screaming “HELP!” at school to make his presence known, or the way that other kid picks his nose, because they’ve all got something, because we’ve all got something, and it’s really about that. About my stuff. About everybody’s.

The local grocery sells banged-up produce at a discount, but I’m wondering if that might be the best kind.

Last Monday, we were walking down our suburb’s main road, fresh off a trip to the toy shop, when an older kid passing in the other direction did a double take and stared at TK. I glanced at TK myself, wondering if he was standing out in any way and prepared to fight, then the older kid smiled. “Hi James,” he called out, and I relaxed as TK, predictably, glanced his way and ignored him for his new toy. But I turned to the kid. “Hi!” I compensated. “Do you know James?”

“Yeah, I went to his school last year,” he told me. “I’m at the high school now.”

I asked his name, thanked him for saying hello, and walked the boys to the car with tears in my eyes: we’re now getting stopped on the street. Sometimes–often? Always?–things aren’t what they appear at first.

Later, a girl who lives a few houses down knocked on our door and asked for a play. We headed to her front yard, populated with toys, and she pointed out a car to TK. “That’s a beautiful car,” he proclaimed, and she looked up at me and grinned. It wasn’t the response either of us expected. It was better. It was him.

And this past weekend, we were sociable every day and somehow are still alive. We connected with new friends and older ones over things happening to our kids, which are of course things happening to us, and there was frustration and anger and joy and laughter and all of it. We strategised and questioned and planned. “Here’s to not having it all together,” one of us said, and I exhaled a breath that I didn’t even know I was still holding. The kids ran around us, torches lighting up the sky and house, and a knock at the door revealed a policeman. He told The Husband he had been called by a neighbour who, because of the lights bouncing around, was worried we were being robbed. “I’m a bit embarrassed really,” he finished, “Now that I see what’s actually going on.”

After speculations were proffered in the hope we would end up subjects of this week’s crime section in the local paper, I thought about it again: all the first impressions that don’t have to persist, but can only be broken through the awkwardness, through the revealing, through the sticking around and not having it all together. This opening, like flowers to the sun, the light being the thing that both hurts, and keeps us alive.

“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.” –C.S. Lewis

There’s just no way to predict it.

I expect the tears on Monday, when we’ve had the weekend together, to blend and lean in to each other, each settling into the next one’s edges and curves until we emerge after the weekend, one unit that must be broken for another five days. Monday comes and both boys head into their schools with minimal protests, absent of tears, and I walk away from them pleasantly surprised.

Then Tuesday arrives to bitch slap me in the face and I’m left reeling.

Little Brother was denied entry into a tower-building partnership by a boy with whom I had thought, five minutes earlier, I had established a rapport. Harrumph. I thought for sure that would bring on the waterworks, as he looked at me uncertainly; then his teacher suggested they read a book together and he nodded resolutely, walking off to hold said teacher by the hand, and The Kid and I headed to his school.

We arrived, switched out his reader and hung his bag as usual, and he was all smiles for the whole of it. Then, inexplicably (to me), the tears began: “School is hard. School is boring. Take me home.” From someplace deep within me came the strength and conviction that are not of me, and I took a knee beside him, the ground gravelly and painful on my skin.

“Remember: I’ll share the sad with you.”
“What will happen to it?” he asked, knowing the answer.
“It will get lighter until you don’t even feel it.”
“Where’s God?” he asked, knowing the answer.
“In your heart.”

I went on to tell him other answers he already knows: that his therapist is with him. That he’s stronger than anyone I know–the scar on the back of his neck (and countless other memories he hasn’t even retained but I have) proving it. That he is loved and cared for and kept.

“Walk up the steps with me,” he said, and I pushed against my own weight, against the weight of a thousand heartbreaks, to walk that way, then turn around. He went into the classroom and out of my sight.

Out of my sight, but the weight remains. It remains for the mothers I talk to throughout the day, commiserations longer than the days themselves, stretching out through the years with our worries over these children we’ve carried and still carry, always, one way or another. The seven pounds at birth translating to a weight that grows throughout a lifetime, in and out of moments and never leaving. The weight of love, of responsibility, of obligation, of limited freedom but occasional glory.

The other day I was walking TK home and up ahead, I saw another mother with her son. On the main road, with the six lanes of traffic speeding by. They were skipping.

There are some weights that lift us.

“Many hands make lighter work,” my friend said to me the other night as she helped wash our dinner dishes, quoting her mother half-jokingly, and I thought of all the people who have been added to our life by our struggles, by our move, by the things we never would have chosen. How content I would have been to stay comfortable, protecting myself. How I never knew it before, the way to turn a Transformer robot into a car and back again. How I never would have had scar stories.

Last weekend, The Husband and I went out for Valentine’s Day, celebrating it our favourite way: with a movie. A new world in Africa opened up to us onscreen and afterward, we stepped into the Sydney night, a new world that is now a year old to us, that never would have happened had the boundary lines of our existence–the ones I set–not been scattered. The weight of life fluttering in the breeze all around us, grace with wings, kindly making us feel as though we were the ones who pulled something off.

“…it does deepen you to be dark-minded…if you’re lucky or if you come out of the other end of it, it also brings you to compassion, I think, for other people.” –Mary Karr

The other day I had the thought–much like Carrie Bradshaw in her series finale—what if this had never happened? The “this” in question was TK’s diagnosis, almost exactly three years ago. The denial afterward. The ache for so long about what it meant, what he and we had lost. The scramble to find a school and therapists for him.

The school we found for him. The therapists who came into our house every week. The people we met in waiting rooms and therapy centres. The school where we landed here in Sydney. The therapists who have become like family. The friendships we’ve made, deeper because of what they know and how they help.

Would I take it away, I wondered, knowing what I know now? Three years down the road?

A friend called last week during the wreckage that was the start of school for TK and Little Brother, in the midst of my guilt and anxiety and nausea, the ups and downs of an adjustment period knocking us all flat. She told me that she had spoken to TK’s teacher from last year about what a wonderful class it had been, how special it was and how they missed it, how it had been different from other classes. Why was that, my friend wondered.

The teacher spoke TK’s name. She said that sometimes “different” can pull apart, but sometimes it can establish. Bring together. Call out the best. That, last year, it–through TK–had done the latter. I put down the phone and cried: my boy, seen. Known. What could be better than that?

Differences can tear apart or mend. So, I think, can likenesses. Sometimes, when I look at my children, I think that what can piss me off the most is when they resemble me.

LB with his fiery demands, the latest being a line of PJ Masks figurines lined up just so before he does ANYTHING: using the toilet, brushing his teeth, BREATHING. His bottomless need for affection (“sit by me” meaning “let me sit on top of you”) doing battle with his independence and need for space, all on his terms. TK and his curiosity, reflected in a million whys a day, constant background sound doing battle with his occasional reflection periods, a processing going on beneath the surface that can be so easily missed. His anxiety raising my own, or maybe it’s the other way around?

I’ve had a voice inside my head my whole life, a constant narrator who serves as judge, and I’m only recently learning how to turn it off. Then TK shows up to replace it, or wrangle with it for preeminence in the moment, and I want quiet even while remembering the years of silent aching, hoping he would speak. The same friend told me that her daughter came home the other day, telling her, “I heard James on the playground today! His voice is so cute.” And I thought about that all week, this voice that I ached for and now could use a mute button for, how it can be all things at once–but yes, mainly very, very cute.

I like my kids better when they’re a window rather than a mirror: when they open up new ways of seeing things that are easier to write about in blog posts or capture on Instagram. When they crack jokes rather than whine, when they hug rather than pull, when they smile rather than cry. I want them to be better than I am in the moment so that the moment will be easier for me. That’s really ugly, and a hell of a demand to put on a child. It’s also being human, and it’s bound to happen within five minutes of my picking them up from school today.

Would I take it away? The hard parts, the things I didn’t want to hear, the diagnoses and the adjustments and the pain? Three years ago I would’ve. And in so doing would have erased everything that makes us who we are, who we’re becoming, who we’re meant to be.

Today at school drop-off, one of TK’s friends came up and tried to hug him. He tried to escape the embrace, but she wouldn’t let him. Despite his running and pushing, she kept on (#neverthelessshepersisted) until, finally, her tiny arms wrapped around him and he was still, his No turning into a Yes, the acceptance of a love that wouldn’t let him go.

This morning I dropped Little Brother off for his second day at his new preschool, which was going swimmingly until I decided to leave, then they had to hold him back while I walked out the door, his shrieks following me to the street. Assume the maternal guilt pose. Then it was The Kid’s turn, for his first day of year one, which he’s been counting down to daily. He took the news of his former therapist’s moving on well when I told him in the car last week so that I wouldn’t have to meet his eye and start crying, and he ran ahead of me as we approached the school gates so that I was afforded the opportunity to scream his name in the middle of the street in terror, then we entered the school yard and a sea of people. He remained excited, if a bit more subdued, as I had fed him the lie that his therapist was stuck in traffic and would arrive shortly. (“Stuck in traffic” = had a death in the family yesterday; “shortly” = by noon.)

What I’m saying is, WHO’S GOING TO POUR ME A DRINK?!

A learning support teacher stepped out of the crowd and homed in on us immediately, God being all anonymous and such, and she promised to stay by his side until his therapist arrived. I waited with the parents of some of TK’s classmates, all of us reluctant to step away just yet. One child cried in his mother’s arms and she gently led him to the class, then stepped out and cried into her husband’s arms. Our war-torn army of veterans then left the battle scene to head in our own directions.

I assumed the maternal guilt pose. Then I prayed. Then I went for a run. Now, I’m just…in the between.

For the first time in a month and a half I’ve got both kids at school. It’s exhilarating and exhausting. We wake up earlier and I’ve got lunches to make. The anxiety sets in when (before) my feet hit the floor. I love it and hate it. I sit suspended in this space, split down the middle: free and chained, happy and sad, concerned and distracted. And it appears that things will always be this way. YAY.

Both of my boys were pulled from my body; even at birth I was unable to push them away. I’ve a biological predisposition for difficulty letting go. But damn was I also ready for them to get out of there. It’s this life between extremes that is so tiring and confusing and fraught, and medication only partly helps.

Where is my drink? How are my kids?

A friend (let’s call her The Sis) told me once that when she’s away from her kids for too long (a year or so) she can’t wait to get back to them, but she knows that within five minutes she’ll feel weary again. SAME. Is it being human, or being mother, that lends itself to this ambivalent form of living? I tend to think it’s being part of the whole now but not yet, home but not life on this earth; the hint of more underlying everything and making a promise that hasn’t yet been fulfilled.

It’s hard, is what I’m saying. And this split existence carries over into the little moments with my boys, the ways they each show up with pieces of me. For so long I assigned LB to The Husband in terms of genetic inheritance: looks, laid-back attitude. TK, poor guy, got all my anxiety and nervous twitches. But each day brings something new: TK laughs like TH, or LB flies off the handle and I assume the maternal guilt pose, all “I resemble that.”

They have split me down the middle, but I’m still jagged. There are rough edges and curves and somehow this all fits together better than a clean cut. Complications persist, and the story goes on.

The other day I was thinking I should make a business card that reads “Professional (ha) Mother: When I say Yes I mean Maybe.” When I say calm I mean frazzled. When I say wired I mean tired. When I say terrified I mean…I am…held. Grace where I am, which right now is hours away from pickup, blocks away from my children, and somehow right where we’re supposed to be.

Another week, another writing of the blog from the dining table while Paw Patrol plays in the background.

This past weekend, we took a family trip to Melbourne. If The Husband and I were on the trip sans kids, which we were not, we would have stayed in the city, wandering its quaint alleyways and drinking and eating our way through their restaurants. We would have lingered over brunch one morning, savouring mimosas and Bloody Marys. We would have caught a match at the Australian Open and ambled through the park afterward.

We did none of those things.

Instead, we stayed at the beach. At a family-friendly hotel. We eschewed dinner plans one night out of exhaustion (mine) and ordered in. We went to Legoland Discovery Centre and saw half of Coco after driving through the rain to find Paddington 2 was sold out. We went to Luna Park and endured endless whining there, and walked through Kids’ Day at the Open to watch a shitty PJ Masks concert while our children cried there too. All of this was after a solid month of my being with the kids day in and out, through plane rides and airport checks, in beds and pools over two continents and hemispheres. We have been solidly together, this family.

I’m so sick of them.

The Husband had planned another trip in two weeks’ time, a driving holiday to the Hunter Valley, a wine region near Sydney. The kids were coming with us. I politely (tersely) asked if we could cancel it. I think I’ve had about all the travel I can take: the laundry and the packing before, the unpacking and the laundry after, the unfamiliarity and the anxiety it entails for at least two of us. I love my family, they are driving me crazy, I want to be with no one else, I want to be away from them for a considerable length of time, and all these things are true at once.

The Kid has taken to asking hundreds of questions a day. This is not an exaggeration. He asks questions he already knows the answer to and questions he doesn’t. He asks questions that have answers and questions that don’t. I have no f-ing idea why it’s Monday, man. And if you ask me again I’m going to need more meds. Also, I love you more than almost anyone (excepting two) in the world. How is this all possible?

The Husband asked me, during one of my stares his way as TK volleyed another set of queries, if I remembered when I couldn’t wait for him to speak. He smirked, and I launched plans to find a slow-acting, undetectable poison.

I think about all we try to cover up and pretend is pretty because these contradictions, this ambivalence, might just make us look…well, crazy. We are only allowed to be one thing: grateful. Right? One of my friends (okay, many of them, which is why they’re my friends) will have none of that. Call a turd a turd and such. Especially the one you carry in your hand to the bin because your kid just excreted it in the shopping centre’s car park.

This is life: the people I love the most drive me the most crazy. They are most in danger of my ire, my impatience, my shortcomings. They require the most grace from me and give the most and then we fail and forgive each other. It’s not a dance, exactly, though it has a rhythm; it’s more of a flailing. We’re all Little Brother, swinging our arms and legs around to nonexistent music and praying it makes sense in the end.

Speaking of Little Brother–he is as emotionally authentic as they come. He will let you know if he wants nothing to do with you in the moment. He wakes up full of joy (except from naps) and he screeches when things don’t go his way. I don’t know what to do with all that honesty except learn from it.

I don’t want to sigh my way through my marriage or my sons’ childhood. Summer is hard, though. Togetherness can be fraught. Your confidante turns into your target, your kids turn into your therapy bill. But who else can you, at the end of a screechy, tense, trying day, eat fries in bed with? Who else will endure your Chinese-food farts (that don’t make sense because you haven’t even had any Chinese food)?

LB translated something TK said the other day when I didn’t understand. They are playing and laughing and conversing, and the next minute they’re at each other’s throats and crying, and I sigh again. As I do, I hear my sister and me across the decades, our afternoons spent playing and fighting and my mom’s sighing reaching across the years. The sighs don’t end anything; they give us breath for the next day, hour, minute. Maybe tomorrow we’ll do better. Maybe we won’t. But either way, we’ll be there together.

But thank God we canceled that trip.

I have figured out the formula for the holidays: brief Christmas stop in wintry America followed by ringing in the New Year in summery Australia.

You’re welcome.

I realize not everyone has access to these choices; I wouldn’t have two years ago, due to grace not yet intervening and demanding it (although up to one year ago I would have written that off to my own refusal to participate in grace’s demands, i.e. a deluded sense of control over my own life, i.e. the operating system by which we all abide until the lid on our own plans is blown off and we realise we’re not running this show). But I’ve done the American Christmas/Sydney New Year Itinerary twice now and it works: short, cold days set to a soundtrack of carols; kicking off the year with a backyard BBQ by the pool.

It’s insulting what grace has forced me to acquiesce to, but I’m doing my best.

If I sound smug, it’s because I’m being a jerk. Every change that I’ve encountered in my life, every deviation from my plan, I have fought and resisted and complained about. I’ve requested a change in management. I’ve sputtered at the fact that this was all worked out a long time ago, by ME, and the rules I set aren’t allowed to change, DAMMIT. And so many of those changes were insulting: years of singleness during prime childbearing time, days spent in doctor’s offices and nights spent in hospital rooms, loss of a pregnancy in the bathroom at work, the internet going out for extended periods right when I was bingeing a new show. Not one of the changes to plan was without merit (except the internet failure; haven’t found the deeper meaning in that yet), but they all had their attendant struggle and pain that mired the good so much it seemed impossible to discern.

Sydney, though, after a year, seems without flaw. Without negative. Which is inaccurate, and revisionist history. Which is why I fight going “home” so much (quotations added for emotional analysis). Every time. You see, it complicates things: there is the re-encountering of family and friends and the re-realisation that it sucks to be away from them. There is the sense of familiarity provided by grocery stores that house all our bad food choices. There are the people whose accents sound like ours. There is crispy bacon, and there is (are?) grits. It’s much easier, emotionally and existentially speaking, to continue communicating with the people back home over internet apps and email and the occasional (gasp!) phone call rather than actually having to feel the feelings. Also, there’s no jet lag.

But we went “home” for Christmas anyway.

And while we loved, and were emotionally challenged by, the time spent with family and friends (really, we did and were), what stood out the most to me was the time spent with just the four of us. Specifically, time in the air and in hotel rooms, since that is where so much of it occurred, doors closed to the outside world and moments suspended in semi-wakefulness populated by just us: boredom and thrill, landing and takeoff, packing and unpacking, joy and utter irritation. Nowhere to go but to each other.

It’s about to be that way a LOT, especially for me and the boys, as we are staring down the barrel of a month of summer “vacation” (quotations added for sarcastic analysis) together. Blessed be the fruit, as they would say on The Handmaid’s Tale, which I watched through my fingers on the flight back to Sydney. A year ago we spent that time mostly alone but for us three, and by February I was on my way to a mental rupture in IKEA. This year, I have friends besides wine and the month is looking decidedly less…bleak. The boys and I know each other better, and this is not nothing. This knowledge has been forged in hotel rooms and on planes and in doctor’s waiting rooms and in hospitals and in all the ways grace has gently but firmly forced it to occur. We are reaping the benefits of staying; of saying yes (usually through gritted teeth). Of, really, grace not taking no for an answer.

I expect there will still be plenty of rough moments and regrets. But there will also be a higher dosage of Lexapro, and more support/witnesses. So what I’m saying is, I’m hopeful. And that ain’t nothing either.

On our flight back “home,” I took The Kid to the bathroom during one of those semi-wakeful moments, my contacts out and earplugs in, and as we navigated the tiny space together, he looked around and said, apropos of nothing, “This is where the magic happens.” I considered the surroundings: toilet, sink, questionable odors, our other two sleeping nearby, the four of us suspended between two countries, two continents, two homes. Magic in the moment, apropos of everything.

I’ve been waiting on something bigger than Christmas my whole life.

The sadness of the ending of a childhood Christmas–Santa long gone, school break zooming to an end–gave way to a post-Christmas depression for Adult Me: Christmas music silent, Christmas movies disappearing, the season of goodwill giving way to just…cold. The tree with no presents underneath became a burden, holding boxes of ornaments to pack up, the removal of each of them signalling the end of my favourite season.

A barren winter without twinkling lights and the promise of more on the horizon is perfect fodder for depressive tendencies to kick in, and I’ve battled them every year. Then, last year, instead of enduring that winter, we hopped on a plane and headed toward summer, and that move across the world–while allowing me to avoid climactically-generated blues–brought its own adjustments and breakdowns before joy and familiarity arrived.

This year is different.

The Sis said it in a message, how as an adult she’s always felt different about Christmas ending than she did as a child, and the word she used was one unfathomable to me before this past Monday night: relief. But this year I felt it too, the relief of Santa pulled off for another year, of happy children living still in the magic of it all, of a turkey cooked well and family gathered without bloodshed. And, not for nothing, relief at our family of four surviving yet another cross-country trip…and facing one more in the opposite direction. In another place that has become, also, home.

This Christmas night, a night that has always felt unbearably piercing to me in its comparison to the one before–the anticipation of Christmas Eve–I stepped onto our Atlanta porch and gazed at the twinkling lights, felt the icy air. My bare feet groaned against the cold of the wood beneath them, and I yearned: not for Christmas to swing right back around again, but for the warmth of another hemisphere, the longer days and the beaches and pools and summer break awaiting us. My feet firmly on the ground here while another place pulls me back.

And this being between two places, it’s inconvenient and uncomfortable and at times emotionally turbulent but it’s also this: a gift. A gift in the abundance it reveals us to have, family in one place and friends who are like that in another, but gift also in that it reveals, as all good gifts do, a deeper truth: that this yearning, this split way of living, this ache that never abates, is a sign of more. Of what is bigger than Christmas even as Christmas is what brings it, of what is bigger than twinkling lights and adorned trees.

Of what is bigger than unadorned trees, the limbs that are bound into crossbeams that shadow over a hill named Death. Of what is bigger than death and all the blows it brings before it comes. Because it’s just this year that I’m realising how Advent is not really a waiting, but an arrival. See, I’d always thought it was about me. Typical. But this year, from both sides of the world, I’ve known a love that chases me across the globe, that reveals itself in glimpses: the bi-continental blessings of those who show up for me, for my family. The army of people we never would have known without our move, without our challenges. I’d always wanted to dance through life, but now I’m to the part where I find out all I would have missed.

The old proverb goes, “God is not a kindly old uncle, he is an earthquake,” and I wonder if the dancers know him only as uncle. If the power of the earthquake is only met through struggle. An earthquake that is love that resettles families across the world and brings them back again, that shows up in every hello and goodbye and arrival and departure. That is, always, an advent.

Crying helps me slow down and obsess over the weight of life’s problems. –Sadness

I was walking home from the hairdresser’s, my newly lightened and shortened locks swinging in the sun, when the phone rang. Along with my hair, I felt lightened, the product of longer days and pleasant weather I guess, along with the wrapping up of a pretty amazing first year here. When I saw the name of The Kid’s therapist on my screen, though, I felt a pause in my mood. And as he delivered the news that he would be taking another job next year, my peaceful easy feeling dried up into ashes, the pendulum swinging wildly in the opposite direction from where it had been moments earlier.

He explained the reasoning, which was all sound and rational, and we spoke about it for a few minutes as I walked into the house we would be moving out of in a week’s time. When we hung up, I set the phone down and tried to catch my breath. Then I started sobbing.

It’s been awhile since grief visited us here.

The past few months–ever since our initial adjustment, my near-breakdown, and a fine-tuning of my meds–have, looking back, been somewhat of a dream. Daily drives by the beach, purple blooms on the sidewalk, glowing reports from both boys’ schools, growing friendships marked by bottles of wine shared and stories told. We’ve marked milestones and celebrated holidays, touted triumphs and made our way through this Sydney life as a unit of four growing closer all the time. It has been gift after gift. Sometime, the other shoe had to drop, right? Sometime, it all had to fall apart?

This is what the phone call did to me; this is how I operate: in the face of a bump in the road, I shake my head, say “I knew it,” and begin to despair.

And I used to stay there, hopeless and afraid, until denial floated along and I would grab it, or distraction came by and I’d cling to it. The urge to just dull my aching via Netflix was strong; I’ve never wanted to glaze my eyes with Facebook updates more. Instead, I cried. Hard. For awhile. Alone.

Fun, right? The End. Except…not.

I’m convinced that of all of our emotions (and I know everything there is to know about them, having watched Inside Out countless times with my kids), one of the truest is grief. It gets twisted into so many others–anger, irritation, fear–but underneath so many feelings is the grief that has a rightful place in our hearts, reflective as it is of the chasm between how things should be and how they are. In my draw-up, TK’s shadow therapist would remain with him until the end of high school, maybe on into adulthood (because that’s not weird), never requiring of me a hard conversation with my son, or a goodbye that breaks our hearts. Then again, in my draw-up, Australia was never on the table. I never would have met the two friends I told first: one who texted back that she’d be coming over that afternoon, and the other who booked me on her couch the next evening.

But in that intervening period, before wine and commiseration, even before I called The Husband in breathless tears, I just cried. I cried as prayer, a “WHY?!” that will never end this side of eternity, a “HELP!” that won’t either. I cried for the changing of a relationship that has meant so much to TK–to us all–this year. I cried for the loss of a constant for him, and us. I cried for all the goodbyes that should never have to happen, for all the sad that has yet to become untrue. I cried because I was sad, and I let myself be, and as I did, I felt less alone. I felt the peace–not of a good haircut and a sunny day, but the real, raw, abiding peace beyond myself–descend upon me, the knowing that the same grace that brought us here and gave us the gift of one good thing will not suddenly stop showing up. I cried, and I’m still crying, though less, yet always, because this side of eternity there will be grief and I’ll be damned if I numb myself to it.

Turns out we’re going to have to do real life in Australia too. Dammit. I wish someone would have warned me.

And as the Christmas season kicks in, salt rides on the hot air and I’m conflicted. It doesn’t feel like Christmas here, without icy breezes and crunching leaves. Yet Advent happens no matter how I feel.

I sat the other night on the deck that will soon be replaced by another and cried some more. I looked for Christmas and felt only heat, tasted salt. The wind blew mightily, another weather pattern here that does not fit into my Yuletide profile, and above me, a bird clung to the branch of the tree outside our window: the tree we love, that TK said looks like an alligator. I wondered if he was afraid, the wind seeming to push against him, to do battle against the wings he was given that should take him where he needs to go. He gave a few false starts and I began to think he might just stay there, in one place, forever. Then the wind blew a last time and he let go, riding on it or pushed by it, carried by it exactly to where he was meant to be.

“So tell me about Will,” he said from across the table, and everything about and leading up to the moment was unusual: the way I’d kissed the male three-quarters of our family goodbye at church and set off across town on foot solo; the December sun beating down on me while Christmas songs played through my headphones; the quiet of a two-adult Sunday lunch; the bottle of rosé sitting between us. The company: one of my closest friends since our meeting in New York a decade ago. The question: an opportunity to discuss Little Brother, so rare in comparison to queries over The Kid’s well-being and my own progress reports on him. LB’s wellness is cared about, but not obsessed over. I battle guilt over that difference even as I often assume his happiness myself.

So I talked about LB: about his brashness and sensitivity, his boldness and shyness, his gentle reminders, when we’re focused elsewhere, about his presence. His specialness. My concerns over the potential of him feeling left out, less noticed.

We talked about that, then everything else. We laughed, and shared, and drank. It was soul-healing, being with someone who’s known me through time zones and across countries and through realness and over phone lines. So it had to go on, naturally, for six hours.

These spots are coalescing: the visits and the new people and the web of interactions and support and beauty that is making this place home. They’re each growing bigger and touching each other: old friends meeting new over a Thanksgiving dinner, my first big project in our Australian kitchen being a turkey for ten and a TOTAL SUCCESS, but not without the help of those friends, or their company. And when we gathered before the meal for what is customarily a prayer, I just said I was thankful, for all of them, for how we got here, which…is still a prayer. I forgot to serve dessert, so we had wine instead, the kids playing inside, the men around the table, and me with the only other woman in the lot, sharing life and our gratitude for each other.

The next morning I was hungover–of course–and the boys piled into our bed, the mattress overflowing with people, and it all felt like too much. The same kind of too much as a few nights before, when TH was at a work dinner and so I let the boys fall asleep with me, one on either side, their bodies pressed against me and my hands full of them, so little space for myself. “This is just too much,” I had thought. “Too much…” and I realised the word I was looking for was love. They love me too much for comfort, too much for space. What a wonderful problem to have, frustration and gratitude dawning simultaneously but less and less equally, because the love…it changes me.

It’s the only thing that changes me. The trying-for-a-better-attitude, the fear, the rule-keeping, none of it works or ever has. Now, when bad news happens–when a policeman pulls me over for turning left ten minutes before it’s allowed, or TK’s therapist calls to let me know he’s taking another position next year–the range of emotion, from irritation to grief, it doesn’t dissipate; if anything, it’s more intense because my heart is more open. But the question afterward–what am I going to do?–it’s gone, replaced by a new one: what are YOU going to do? I ask it to grace, to God, to the love that got us here in the first place. That has never stopped showing up. That fills my bed with family and my deck with people and my life with friendships. It fills my hands on Sundays, the blessing at the end calling me to upturn them, the weight on them, every week, mysterious…but not inexplicable.

And this love that is within and beneath and before everything, it shows up seemingly unexpectedly, but the surprise tends to wear off the more you look for it. My friend who, when she asked how Thanksgiving dinner went and I told her about the red wine explosion from my mouth all over my bathroom, instead of head-shaking responded with “I really do love you” alongside a laughing-crying emoji. Then there’s TK, who says it so rarely in comparison to LB’s constant attestations. The other morning, when we were the only two awake, he sat up, turned to me, turned back to the window with its view, and proclaimed, “I love you.” Apropos of nothing. Apropos of everything.